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00:00:00,000 [Music] So if you’re listening to this, that means you’ve had a week’s gap from episode one, part one. Which means that you’ve had a week where you’ve been wondering,
00:00:24,800 on earth was going to be said next and next pieces. Wonder what other nuggets of information were coming from my guest. And you’ve had a week where you’re been able to apply those nuggets
00:00:34,500 because you didn’t know they existed or what they were. Which is a
little bit frustrating already. Because imagine how much more efficient, productive,
00:00:44,300 or amazing you could have been. When you know there’s a way of 00:00:52,200 reading, you know that you can pop along the Patreon. 00:01:04,700
00:01:14,700 Don’t pay Patreon/.com/sundee-lunch-PM or to Spotify, have a look at
the feed and there’s a little lock. Look, I’m a lock, and I’ll ask you to pay.
It’s price for coffee. That’s it, a month, and you’ll get everything a week early. And you won’t have bits like this in it with me,
which you’re in all about becoming a Patreon and things like that. So,
never think. And anyway, I’ll shut up now because you probably think it. Just get on with it tonight.
00:01:24,700 So yeah, here’s the second part of the show. So, I have a number of
responses, affiliate links, in the way that it’s set up, that have kindly allowed me to share their services really.
00:01:54,700 The first one is my clean, Mike runs PM on my PM courses. And it is a great result for getting those fundamentals of project management
trained, reasonably priced, and Mike presents it in an accessible and clear manner.
00:02:20,700 You can check out some of his videos on his YouTube channel and kind
of give you a view of where they are. The code for that, if you go to nodulacreset.com/onlinePM courses
00:02:34,700 or all one with a look case, that will be directed to it. There’s very
different levels that you can buy, you can buy individual courses, you can buy pathways, as well, if you like.
00:02:46,700 And I get a kick back off those, Mike kindly shares me that. So, if you
do jump on and use it, I hope you find it really useful. I think yes, I’ll leave that down to you, and that as well.
00:02:59,700 So, there’s a third of a ticker risk on that. So, jump on that, and that 00:03:12,700 again is nodulacreset.com/onlinePM courses. And enjoy. 00:03:26,700
I’ll give you a story from the book. We solicited war stories from people
on late 10, which I wish we had thought this was from the next edition,
we’ll get one from you, I’m sure you have 100 of them. War stories were
stories where things went horribly well or horribly wrong. For example,
my friend in Boston who has, I’ll get to the cultural one in a second,
00:03:39,700 who did the Project Management Office, I forget the exact details, one
of her project managers went on a call and got lost in cyberspace. So, in a breakout room, why not staying in the breakout room,
00:03:51,700 quitting back to the main room, lost the entire meeting based on that,
like a black mirror episode or something. And then, of the cultural one, that Rich came up with,
00:04:01,700 which was a bunch of guys or people visiting Japan. And there’s a very
formal greeting card thing, I believe, the greeting card or the business card represents you, it is you in a sense.
00:04:16,700 And one of the guys saw this gleaming table, and couldn’t resist taking his card, and skimming it across the table. And the Japanese were horrified, I would be anyway in the States,
00:04:28,700 but it was double that in Japan, it was a complete insult for him to do that. He was non-cognizant of the culture. So, I think working internationally and meeting it, by the way,
00:04:40,700 when we work in, I should mostly get a meat internationally, we’re not
going to go over the wealth of things, we’re going to meat, respect the
culture, know the culture you’re going into, and I say that whether it’s me going over to the Middle East,
00:04:53,700 or me going to say Alabama, you know, you may not know the
differences here, but in the north, we are a lot, the north of the United States. We are a lot more, we’re not as friendly.
00:05:06,700 We’re not as sociable as the southerners say. I just came up with a
cruise recently, a lot of southerners. They’re so warm and friendly, there’s differences among us between the north and south,
00:05:16,700 but the southerners are more, how you doing, has it going, do you want
some iced tea? There’s just a casual neighborliness that they have, that
we, especially in the northeast, if you go from New York to Boston to Washington DC Card,
00:05:31,700 or we know time for pleasantries, it’s all, let’s just get business, we’re not unfriendly. New York doesn’t have time for that, so I have to
acclimate if I work or teach in the south, to that level of neighborliness.
00:05:45,700 I remember I taught in Indianapolis, I was doing a meeting, a class, a
lot of the people, that’s the center of the country, Midwest, ish, Indiana. A lot of people are driven up from Kentucky.
00:05:57,700 Why could they talk? They come back from lunch and they were all
socializing, I had to all but get a whip to get them back into the meeting, because they were socializing and whatnot, having a good time.
00:06:07,700 So yes, organizational culture is important, this is why I say, this stuff is
so fundamental. I mean, if I’m going to hire somebody to run my project and they say,
00:06:18,700 I have ten certifications like you do Jim, I know Microsoft Project Link to
Back in my hand, and I’m an adueless and I know Jira and I say, “Yeah, but can you talk to people? Can you communicate with people? Can you talk to stakeholders?
00:06:33,700 Can I trust you? That I care about.” I kind of don’t want to give it down,
but your certifications, I want to know, can you do your soft skills? What they call power skills? No, PMI.
00:06:44,700 So I think those are important. And by the way, as I think about it, either I make these things up as I go along or they pop it into my head as we’re talking,
00:06:53,700 I think those are much more needed the way we’re doing it now, because you can’t see my body language. I taught PMP for nine years for whatever reason,
00:07:05,700 remote, two different customers, and I never set foot inside of a class. When that ended and I set foot in a class, I said, “This is so much
better.” When I explained concepts like earn value or critical path, people doing this, people doing this,
00:07:21,700 or what? Exactly. Now if there’s ten people in the screen, I can’t see the
most somewhere in the cameras, but I can feel the energy in the room,
too. In the previous class, as I had, I would have, I would get to quality.
00:07:36,700 No offense to the quality people, but I know quality reasonably well.
And I found this interesting, part of it, people just fall asleep during it.
We were getting there at two o’clock in the afternoon on the second day of a, of a, of a brain dump for me to them.
00:07:50,700 They’d be, so I had to say, “Let’s take a break.” That’s harder to see on the remote. So I think we have to have better antenna on remote because we just don’t see everything.
00:08:06,700 Yeah, I think it’s sometimes. No one asked. I don’t get that. I think it’s,
it’s that. It’s funny, it’s some of the discipline of, it really means. And I had, listening to, meetings is such a big thing of what we do.
00:08:23,700 And everybody said, “This meeting could have been an email, so it may
be, it’s kind of all these things.” Which is great, because I wouldn’t have read the email if someone had sent it. So you know what I mean? So they’d have nothing to do with those scenarios.
00:08:33,700 That’s where I end up with that, I think. Yeah, if it’s been an email, I’m
unlikely to read it. So therefore, it’s even less effective than a meeting in my mind, but I think the thing is, is it, it’s a communication.
00:08:44,700 And it’s a, it’s a communication tool. It’s one of the millions of
communication tools. And it is the most effective. Face to face meeting is the most effective if it’s done right.
00:08:56,700 Right. If it’s done poorly, it can be the least, the biggest waste of time
you can imagine. And that’s, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because an
email, you can do it really quickly and really effective, ineffective.
Because you have no control over, there’s laughing in the background of my children who are,
00:09:16,700 no, I’ve got a podcast on and they, they seem to entirely silent, except
for one of start recording. So I’ll have some conversations with them
later. It doesn’t always pick up because it’s microphone’s direction, but even so, it distracts me.
00:09:31,700 Sorry about me. That one. Yeah. So bow and bony, you get a call out on the podcast that you’ve been in pain in the back sides. 00:09:38,700
00:09:43,700 So tell them that I’ve done that. I’ll show them later on. Yeah, they will.
So, and I’ve lost my training thought, except that I was going, yeah, the
fact that, and I remember, it’s the manager tools podcast, which is one
of my favorite podcasts for a lot of you of learning stuff and actually York. Wayne’s Wayne, Tim Owls, one was one of my early podcasts.
00:10:02,700 Oh, I used to listen to the, the, oh, is it the something middle manager? 00:10:09,700
Wasn’t it the Gretchen middle manager? I haven’t listened to it. I only know him through, through Rich and through their, his book, I don’t know his podcast.
00:10:15,700 Yeah, it was quite a long time ago he did that podcast, it was one of the
early ones I listened to. But the thing that, they said in the manager tools, one was around using,
00:10:29,700 planning a meeting, having an agenda, setting expectations, trolling a
meeting, thinking about what you’re going to do, keeping to the agenda, the timings of the agenda, all these things that,
00:10:43,700 if you, whether it’s face to face, whether it’s remote, poor meetings, 00:10:52,700 don’t have that kind of structure.
Right. Now, you have some meetings that are kind of updates and that’s kind, kind of okay, they can be a bit of a maroon meandering because some people, they need a little bit,
00:11:00,700 more longer, some people don’t, but then the difficulty might be that
you’ve got to talk here, like me, which is going to take 15 minutes to tell
you what you could have told you in five, and someone who’s after me who really wants to get out of that meeting quickly,
00:11:13,700 because they’ve got to drop to a client meeting or something like that,
and would like to give their updates and then excuse themselves. But so again,
00:11:22,700 the more structure you put into those meetings, now sometimes you
need to add that flexibility. And like you said, they’re thinking, it’s about thinking about the purpose of the meeting,
00:11:31,700 thinking about the outcome you want for the meeting and thinking about
the people in the meeting, what they’re important, what they’re about, which takes time and effort, which we don’t always do.
00:11:41,700 And that’s the thing that I think, how do you see that on that preparation 00:11:51,700 for meetings? You know, it’s interesting.
00:11:59,700
00:12:05,700 I have a lot to say about this, and I’m not going to say that, but I’m not 00:12:11,700 going to say that, but I’m not going to say that, 00:12:17,700
but I’m not going to say that, but I’m not going to say that, but I’m not going to say that,
but I’m not going to say that, but I’m not going to say that, but I’m not going to say that,
but I’m not going to say that, but I’m not going to say that, but I’m not going to say that,
but I’m not going to say that, but I’m not going to say that, because a project has failed,
00:12:23,700 therefore they blamed the discipline of project management. I want to get into that. They want to be both who were… 00:12:29,700
00:12:35,700 (laughs) Son or a kid. So they want to be both who were left. Right, we’re not going to use hammers anymore, because we’ve been 00:12:41,700 in the nail. Exactly, exactly.
So they want to be both were left where her boss, the director, and her. She wanted me to come in and help revitalize the PMO. So we talked about slides I would do,
00:12:51,700 presentation I would do, and I came in and did… Interestingly as a side 00:12:57,700 note, some of it was remote,
and it was long enough ago that we were walking over to some camera
and holding up our laptop to show people who remote, right, ridiculous stuff.
00:13:05,700 But, you know, that worked to some extent. I did my thing, I gave my 00:13:11,700 talk. Now I wasn’t there to mentor her.
That wasn’t my job. I was there on her request to help rebuild interest in the PMO. I did my talk and then I sat down and she wanted to say something.
00:13:21,700 She talked in such a monotone that I observed that people were… This 00:13:31,700 will happen.
00:13:37,700
00:13:43,700 Drifting away and starting to talk to each other. They had started to tune 00:13:51,700 her out. And it wasn’t like, let’s talk because she’s boring.
They just started to naturally talk to each other. So, if you have to have
all their rights, you have to be interested in what you’re talking about
and be interesting and get people’s attention. The other thing I tell people is, if you’re not, get presentation skills.
I went to a presentation class back in 1990 in Chicago or someplace.
Oh, you’re jiggling at the keys in your pocket. You’re boring, you’re this and that.
00:13:59,700 It’s hard because they’ll video you, but you want. And to learn it… Now I’ve honed whatever I can do to speak from years of teaching. 00:14:07,700
00:14:13,700 Some people will say they’re an introvert. Guess what? So am I.
00:14:19,700 Don’t use that as a crotch. I don’t care if you’re an introvert. Too bad.
You need to dig it up and speak. You need to speak clearly and convey
what you’re trying to say. You need to be interesting to your crowd.
00:14:25,700 So, you have all those things in place. Being interested in interesting speaker. Now, I’m going to save your viewers money on buying the book if they want to buy it.
00:14:33,700 You have two biggest pieces of advice in the book. So, one is… You 00:14:41,700 said, “Be large and in charge.”
00:14:47,700
It’s our meeting, but you’re running it. There’s only one person in charge of the meeting. It’s the project manager.
If the meeting fails or a series of meetings fail, then if I’m running it, I
can go home and say to my wife, “I run these meetings today.” And Joe hijacked and Nigel kept talking.
00:15:01,700 And this other guy kept interrupting. And, you know, if I didn’t have
00:15:09,700 them, I’d be fine. I’d be like to say, “Weren’t you running it? Or my bus?” 00:15:15,700
“Weren’t you running it?” “Yeah, but what could I do?” Well, no one’s trying to…
So, I’m a strategy to keep these people from distracting you. So, you need to be large and in charge. Now, here’s the number one piece of advice.
00:15:21,700 I’m going to back into it. There’s a consultant named Alan Weiss. I don’t 00:15:29,700 know if you’re familiar with him, but he’s an interesting guy.
Alan is the kind of consultant… He didn’t do this exactly, but I give you
the type of level of consulting he is. He’s the kind of guy that he would have gone to one day and said,
00:15:35,700 “Steve Jobs is leaving the company. We need to find a replacement.” 00:15:41,700 He works at that kind of level.
00:15:47,700
00:15:53,700 Okay. So, or worked. He then wrote a book on… …million dollars of 00:15:59,700 consulting and a million dollars of consulting. 00:16:05,700
00:16:13,700 He now consults consultants like me. I’ve been mentored by one of his people. He writes books.
How to get business. How to consult. Writing books, etc. I went to one of his sessions.
And he’s down in Rhode Island. He came up… …right in your Logan Airport, we went to a meeting.
And there was a gal that got up and said, “I gave my customer 10 recommendations.” And he only did one.
How is it? Did he pay you? He said, “Yeah.” And he said, “You’re upset that you’re in your office?”
00:16:19,700 He said, “Well, yeah.” He says, “Stop looking for unconditional love.” 00:16:25,700 Okay.
00:16:33,700
00:16:41,700 Now, Alan is also a psychologist. Do not go into a meeting expecting to 00:16:51,700 be liked, wanting to be liked. Example.
00:16:59,700
00:17:11,700 I go into a meeting. I’m running the meeting. It’s a one hour meeting 00:17:19,700 and our agenda is to plan a project.
00:17:26,700
We have an hour. Plan whatever we can in an hour. Let’s keep it short. And I’ve got a guy who likes to sign up his own voice.
And for 10 minutes, he drones on about something they used to do and nists in that. And in my head, even if I’m conscious of saying,
“If I stop him from talking, he won’t like me anymore.” If that’s what I’m basing it on, then… Guess what?
The other ex-enre people in the room are looking at me saying, “Jim, can you do something here?” So I’m gonna have to go to him and say,
“Hey, you know, Bob, very interesting.” And right at that point, I’m interrupting. Right at that point, I’m interrupting him.
And I’m saying, “Bob, with all due respect, you’ve made your point. If
there’s nothing further, if you have something really important, I’ll talk about other important things.
00:17:36,700 We can set up a separate meeting. You want to hear him, you want to 00:17:44,700 respect him, you need to stop him.” And then move on. 00:17:52,700
00:17:58,700 Stop worrying about being liked and worry about getting through the 00:18:04,700 objectives of the meeting. Numerous times people just, you know,
cross their arms, they’re a little bit offended. I’m not yawning at them. They get it. And very often, you said it yourself.
You said that you like to talk. I don’t know you very well. You’re aware
that you like to talk. People who like to talk, no, they like to talk.
Or the people who have more devious things in mind, the gobbins we
call them the “bulliest” like to intimidate. And we try to shut them down as well.
00:18:14,700 So everything from the innocuous, the people who like to talk, the 00:18:21,700 people who go off in tangents, you must control that situation.
Stop worrying about being liked, start worrying about meeting the objectives. Because I’m going to tell you,
00:18:27,700 if you come out a series of meetings and your boss says, “What were
the results of these meetings?” Well, I couldn’t finish it because of this and that.
00:18:33,700 You boss may say, “Yeah, he’s a pain.” Or he might say, “Are you 00:18:39,700 insuranceing me?” Because guess what? I would. 00:18:45,700
00:18:51,700 If you work for me, I’d say you better learn how to run that mix. Or stop 00:18:57,700 worrying. And in fact, I’ll close this one one thing. 00:19:03,700
00:19:09,700 Alan Weiss, I subscribe to his newsletter, Coincidentally, this week one 00:19:15,700 of the things was,
00:19:21,700
I forget the exact quote, I put it in a slide presentation I’d be doing, was about being liked or not being liked.
Out of nowhere, I haven’t seen him in 10 years, about that very thing, and I put it into there about,
the leaders don’t worry about that. That is not fair thing. We’re not trying to be disliked,
but that is not the primary thing. I don’t think Jeff Bezos is something there to, people like me, they probably don’t.
They may not. He’s not really worried about that. He’s worried about the customer, the service and the customer,
he’s got other problems and whatnot. But they’re worried about servicing the customer. I’m not worried about going and meeting and having people like me.
00:19:27,700 It’s just wrong. So there’s, save yourself the 30 bucks or 30 quid or 00:19:33,700 whatever in the book if you want,
00:19:39,700
00:19:45,700 and do that. And it’s going to be hard at first, but you have to do it.
00:19:51,700 And they come up afterwards and say, do that, practice that. Practice 00:19:57,700 being large in charge and not being light.
00:20:03,700
You mean it will be better? Yeah, it’s great. One of the things I’ve heard about before is
with that sort of scenario where anything it elevates in this remote environment, hybrid environment as well,
is the fact that if you’ve got a dominator in the room and you’ve got people, that dominator will
dominate and overtake some people. You’ve got to be really conscious of you can see it in the room,
00:20:09,700 room, can’t you? Where someone, you’ve got the person trying to make
the point and you’ve got the hi deep just talking over the top of them or
the hi high, right? And the person who dare you calling well, they talked over me. I’m not going to say anything. And they,
00:20:21,440 they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they’re asking whatever
they, they started, dude, right, and you got, Jim, can you just finish, can
you just finish that point you were, trying to make you were making, trying to make whatever, and, or you stop,
00:20:32,040 the other person say, you can, something to finish, when the remote
you can’t, you don’t immediately pick up on, especially if they’re not going to video on, you won’t pick up on that person going down like that. So you’re attention on when people are getting cut
00:20:44,500 over, has to be really fine, it doesn’t it? You, you, and that’s where I
think, and it’s kind of, we, we’ll go into a four hour AI conversation, if
we’re not careful now. The, the, the, the thing I’ve always struggled with, again, I’m better to talk up, be one
00:21:04,580 part, be part of it, I’m terrible note, take it, can’t read my own hand right
in all the striped fine solutions for this. Right. Got to the point where I
started using, um, no, one note and, I see our recognition and stuff like that, and never quite got solution.
00:21:18,780 You know, the, the project managers book, we always used to have that we were, that are notes in that, a doctor could have written mine,
usually, you know, right? Right. Two, fifty six encrypted, um, and so the advent of AI, the advent of products like otter, the use
00:21:37,580 of, we, we do it ourselves, we use teams and let it transcribe as well at
times in these, in these meetings to, um, allow us to capture and be,
then allow you as project manager, rather than having to have, and I’ve had this and it doesn’t work very well, having a, a
00:21:54,900 more junior member of the team take notes, take minutes or, I, one time I was very lucky as someone I had a PA who was, wasn’t my PA, someone else’s, but they came and took notes in the means. It never was quite right. And then you get actions and the words weren’t
00:22:09,460 right, things like that. And AI doesn’t get it right, but it, it, it gets, it’s
ninety, ninety six percent of it, right? Which is, is just as good as human. Um, how do you see that kind of the transform the, the, the ability to do meetings? Cause one of the things you’re saying
00:22:24,820 about where people get lost in cyberspace or just chewed out and think,
well, I should listen back to that. The ability to have a, a digital copy and
a transcription later and trying to remember the conversations, I think it’s really powerful, but it’s not an endemic yet
00:22:39,220 in doing it and part of that’s going to be CO2 storage, they might, CO2
is going to use for, all right, keeping all those recordings, but there’s a
benefit there, isn’t there? And you know, is it interesting to be AI thing? I think you mentioned, did you mention
00:22:52,660 otte or, did you say that or no? Yeah. So my, I use that for a while. Not much meetings, but just for my own, um, uh, your own stuff,
transcription, yes, with a, right, ideas as I’m going for a walk. It’s, it’s interesting because I, here’s my own AI story. First
00:23:12,820 of all, the, the, the world is sort of before and after chat GPT, which
came out last November and sort of all of a sudden it was a big, it’d
been there and all of a sudden that was the tipping point. Um, I was asked to three or four months ago by one of my colleagues
00:23:28,060 to information interview with a guy who wanted to get in the project, I do
this all the time. I mentor people, people want to talk to anybody about
getting in the project management. Oh, one from the UK, at least, two weeks ago, we spoke, yeah, we just, we just do it, right?
00:23:39,660 So he, I gave him a zoom and he came in and it popped up and said,
otter at, which I’d never heard of. And what is that? Okay, whatever. So
we’re talking and we’re talking about his potential career and other stuff, some of his confidential. It ends and then it comes up
00:23:58,100 and says, your otter AI is ready. It, for those of us, we already does
recording and it does transcription and whatnot. I said, what is this? So
I had to create an account to find that and it was recording everything we said and I wrote to the guy and I said, did you record,
00:24:13,540 I don’t know what this is, did you record it? He said, I never heard of it.
As he could, it wasn’t. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. Google meet. Sometimes it’s
Google. It’s got some, I know that, um, although I’ve got otter, I think it may be if it was through a Google meet, it
00:24:27,140 might have done it through and offered it through that. Just, uh, it’s sponsored. No, it was zoomed because it was my, it was my meeting.
In fact, he’s, we’re in a triggered it through my meeting. So we went
back and forth. I don’t know what you’re talking about and I contacted
00:24:40,540 otter to let them know. And the other thing was, uh, I said to him, we
have laws here. You can’t record me without my consent. I, you can’t,
and different states of different laws. I think he was a Connecticut. It was a two way street. Either one of the states that you can’t do
00:24:55,500 that. That was my first thing with that. Interestingly, the reason for me
not to use, I don’t really need it. I tend to get my notes other ways. But
here’s an interesting tidbit for you. Today, Rich and I, my colleague wrote the book had a, uh, a zoom meeting, which I sent
00:25:13,220 him, uh, because we’re putting together a presentation on this very
topic for PMI. As I went into zoom, it added an AI app today came up
with a bomb with a screen. I better have a chance to look up just letting you know when your viewer is no. Rich didn’t get it yet.
00:25:29,780 So they might be rolling out. So is some kind of a app that pops up right
at the bottom, right where it says camera and, and share screen right in
the middle of there. So there is now one built in. If you go into Bing, it’s there. Other AI story that’s interesting that’s
00:25:43,820 not about meeting. I think your, your listeners and viewers might find of
interest. Rich teaches at Boston University, my alma mater, and he’s a
master lecturer there. And he invited me into a conference he had a few months ago to host a session with three or four people
00:26:01,980 to discuss project manager offices or something like that. And, um, one
of the sessions was about AI, because that’s the big thing. And two of
the professors got up and talked about the use of chat GPT specifically. They might have used, what’s the other one, Bard. And,
00:26:20,540 um, they experimented. They asked the AI tool to, oh, here’s what it
was. They were using a, a, a scholastic thing. Students wanted to have
a party is a fake thing. Students wanted to have a party, and they have extramar, y, z about a money. And they said that the chat GPT,
00:26:39,100 give us some options for the type of parties we might do. Well, chat GPT, Kim, here’s the good news. Chat GPT came back with awaited W
E I G H T E T table of the various options of what it would cost and the
best one of those three, whether I have a boating thing or a drinking,
00:26:58,220 whatever it might have been, right? Those various options, even
created a charter. It created all these great artifacts that you and I
would have to turn out over a written, how many charters? It would turn
out. That was the good news. The bad news is, and I know I’m viewing 00:27:13,380 from, from, from meetings, but it’s important. The earned value numbers were wrong. For those who don’t know, earned value
technique, mostly largely used in the government here in the States, other places as well, to gauge performance. You have to use math, dollar, math. It calculated
00:27:30,020 the numbers dead wrong. So they had to go back and calculate the
numbers right. So chat GPT got it partially right and partially wrong. And in my own experiences with A.I., I have asked it questions where it came in. One of them was something about George Lucas and Star
00:27:47,880 Wars. Oh, you know what it was? It was, I said to it, where did the name Indiana Jones come from? I could look, I could go with, I was
curious, it said, well, he went to school in Indiana. And I looked up, George Lucas never went to school anywhere but California, ever at any
00:28:05,260 point in time. Ever. And I went back and said, you’re wrong. He says,
Oh, sorry about that. So take A.I. with it right now with a grain of salt.
It’s new. I hear a thing. It’s the same, it’s the same as using Google, isn’t it? You Google something, you check it on Wikipedia,
00:28:25,540 you have to, anything you’ve got on Facebook, anything that you have
to have that level skepticism on that. And I think the tool is using those
sort of tools for absolutes is not a good idea. Anything other than an expert is a bad idea to take and even then some of
00:28:42,300 that they might have us all to do a bunch of things. If I was using order
A.I., I, but if you said, I, I think it’s a good idea if we do X and if it hurt
you say, I don’t think it’s a good idea and I publish it. What is nice? You’re
00:28:58,060 saying, he doesn’t like this idea and it was a fure or something you
never said. So I, well, the area, I like the idea of minutes, but maybe I’m
all fashioned. I’d still rather take it myself for right or vet them. Well, I got my own notes and do that. Right. I think it’s
00:29:13,860 kind of, I think on the things that we’ve got decisions and the minutes
are the right way. So yeah, I would say the decisions, you need to look at those and we’ve decided this. Okay. Have we? Let’s go back because you go back to that bit of writing and you listen to
00:29:31,900 the recording and you can hear what it says and you can edit it and
correct it or whatever. I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, because I’ve used
it for some of my writing to, to be able to record quickly transcribe and then hop it in and I’ve used words transcription
00:29:47,500 as well. And that’s just, it’s just an interesting one because I do think it’s one of those things that does, as project managers, you do end up
being the note taken that there is that concept of though he who has the pen has the power in the meeting. Right. But actually
00:30:00,260 he who has the pen or she who has the pen isn’t necessarily in the meeting because you’re trying to listen to everything rather than
process and contribute. And that makes it really hard. We talk about
that. We talk about having a scribe. I’m going to get the person that
00:30:15,740 I truck my anybody, she’d say trust, trust, you know, Mary, I’m always Mary and Joe Mary. Can you, would you mind taking it so I can focus on the things that you talked about which are somebody talks over somebody else? And wait a minute, somebody was trying to make
00:30:29,020 a point there and then she’s not writing that down. She writing the
ministry and we go over those at the end. So if at a ball possible, it’s
good to have a scribe. That’s always been the case. I felt for quite a while now if you possibly can time keepers, you can be
00:30:41,020 the time keeper yourself, time keeping is very important. That goes
along with the, the, I’m, I’m usually pretty good at that where I say 15
minutes left and they look at me and grumble say you can grumble all you want, but there’s still 15 minutes left because
00:30:53,020 they grumble now there are 14 minutes left, right? Because people, here’s the thing that when you do work with people to half hour
meeting, whatever you’re doing, exercises, the time goes like this. And
so they spend 10 minutes figuring what they’re going to do and they’ve
00:31:10,140 got 20 minutes left if you’re doing some exercise and whatnot or some
discussion. You have to keep that thing moving along. You have to be a good time keeper. There’s a balancing act there and I think running meetings involves emotional intelligence, knowing yourself, how
00:31:23,580 you come across, how to read the room, how are people feeling, have
your agenda, be large in charge, don’t worry about being like, I’m not
saying fix all these things at the same time, but if your meeting is right now stink and you want to get in better, do your own
00:31:38,740 retrospective, figure out, figure out what’s not going well and figure out
one thing to fix. Fix that then fix another thing. Caviet. I think I
mentioned you, just to you pre-colon Nigel. If you’re working in a toxic environment or the person that’s the, that’s the goblin,
00:31:57,140 the bully where is three levels above you or you’re working in a family
run organization and the brother-in-law, the sister-in-law is giving you a
hard time, these are harder. They may not be solvable in the same way. So if it’s a VP three levels up, I might go to my
00:32:11,620 sponsor and say, somebody from such organizations does something
my meetings, I’ve tried to control it and maybe a sponsor and my boss
has to step in. Don’t try to solve every problem if you have the project manager. I have too many project managers as a consultant or my students who
00:32:28,860 are afraid to escalate. If I escalate, my boss will think, “Well, if you don’t
escalate and things go south, he’ll think even less of you.” When is the
right time? You’re a manager, I think of people, am I correct? Is it fearless? I turn the question, “Tee back to you.” Would
00:32:47,780 you prefer that your people never escalate you and always solve other problems or are there times when they should escalate? No, because
they’re fine-line. The thing is, is you have seen the situation where
people have an escalated, they’ve tried to solve it and they’ve got to
00:33:02,020 point where it’s, or they don’t need to escalate actually. Coming to me to
sound out an approach to deal with the situation isn’t an escalation. If
they come to me and say, “Right, I’ve got this person who works in that area, he’s been right, penniless this meeting, I’ve tried this
00:33:22,700 and tried this and I’m going to try this.” What does that sound like?
Because I’m there to support them, to mentor them in ways to do it and
be that sounding board. Then I might actually say, “Don’t worry about that, I’ll have a word with them.” I may take that on board.
00:33:38,300 Giving me that opportunity to, because it could be one of the things you
know you mean, I know they’re a pain in the backside, I need to have a
word with them, but I need to have a specific word with them, because I’ve dealt with them before maybe and I’ve seen that happen.
00:33:52,100 But again, I think the other point there is also seeking advice, because
if you go there, I’ve tried everything that I can think of, boss, in trying to
solve this situation of this person, this, this, this, this, this. I may come up with another tactic. I may also, quite
00:34:08,620 often, I’ll sit there and go, “Let’s, let’s, because I’ve been more
removed, let’s sit to decide and think about where they’re coming from.
What’s the problem they’ve got? What is it that, why are they just an ass, or are they, or are they, have they got a problem that
00:34:24,260 we’re not addressing and they’re, we need to address them? Is it something else that my team maybe doesn’t know about that I know
about? It can be all manner of things and I think you, the answer is
always go to your boss, but don’t just go, “I don’t know what to do,
00:34:40,140 I’ve not tried anything, because that’s not what you expected.” I was
going to call that out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you said go there. Help, help,
help, I don’t know what to do. You’ve gone. I don’t believe in this thing, come
00:34:51,660 to me with solutions, not problems, because I don’t give a damn if
you’ve got the solution, really. You can go and implement it. That’s fine.
I don’t, why waste, waste their time telling me the good thing that’s going to happen when they’ve already worked it out. That’s what
00:35:07,860 we’re there for, is to help when they’re stuck. Right. And sometimes it’s
just a perspective that helps that. And sometimes it’s absolutely, you’ve got to do something completely different and be an escalation up through the trees. Yeah, I think you said it right, because if they
00:35:24,380 came to you and said, “I haven’t tried anything yet, I’ve thought I’ve
thrown it in your lap, but I probably did that in my early days of project management, because I was, let’s play this way, you learn that one because you have enough people who are a boss to say,
00:35:34,540 you go figure it out, I come back and you try a couple things. Oh, I
guess I didn’t handle that the right way. So yeah, I would want that as well. And I think most people would want that, but in the meeting situation, you have to know when you can address it,
00:35:47,300 try to address it. And again, if it’s that VP, who everybody knows is a
problem and he’s coming to your meeting, well, you know, at least you
have the tools of the things you can’t talk about. Maybe he’s going to a lot of bad meetings, maybe come to your meeting and say,
00:36:01,100 wait a minute, I was ready for a real competition. Jim’s got an agenda.
He’s running this meeting, he’s getting, maybe he’s pissed off because
he’s never getting to the point where he’s getting anything that he really needs, because it means maybe you’re the one meeting where
00:36:13,180 he’s getting what he needs. And it’s like, he’s a breath of fresh air. He
spent all day in meetings, which by the way, I think I mentioned to you, maybe it was offline. I can’t remember now. Rich came up with a graphic too late to put in our book that showed the effect of
00:36:25,740 back-to-back meetings. I worked at one place, back-to-back, to back-to-back, to back-to-back, not me, but other people. And they
showed the brain getting more and more stresses. It was like that. So
space, the matter if you can, there’s things that can be done instead of this
00:36:40,940 fatalistic or meetings or bad attitude. I think part of the back-to-back
meeting thing also is some people see it as a badge of honor. I mean,
back-to-back, to back-to-back, so I’m so I’ll go and work them out. And that means I haven’t got any of the work done that you
00:36:59,300 want me to do. And I’ve got to sit down in front of TV and watch in
MasterChef, where they are really good at telling meetings and doing
your approvals for your expensive work. I mean, there is that kind of bravado of thinking that, where is, I’m not a par are going to
00:37:16,380 virtue, but I’ve got big blocks of time in my diary saying, “Sod off, I’m
doing stuff.” Right, pretty bad. I worked at one place. I’d eaten one. Well, I worked at one place where they had those back-to-back meetings. They
00:37:29,380 were scrummasters as some years ago before I’d really gotten into Agile. And two people, one woman had actually brought me into the company from a class I taught. Two scrummasters, and they would have back-to-back meetings on the phone all day. So they had a cafeteria and
00:37:44,180 go to the cafeteria. And what they would do, I’d go up there, I was a
contract, and I’d eat. They’d go up, get their lunch, go right back to their
desk and work. And I can’t realize it was the culture of that place. I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t do it. I said, “I’m
00:37:56,420 going to do that.” They just went back to the eighth or dusk, and I didn’t
know if that was because I think it just got the idea somewhere in there
that that’s what one does, and if one wants to get ahead. And then it becomes this corporate thing where it’s like, “Why am I doing
00:38:10,700 this nutty thing? Just because every around me is doing different topics.” But again, they were back-to-back meetings. I can see the
effect on them. And I think scientifically, they’ve proven that that’s not a good thing.
00:38:23,260 It’s bonkers. It’s bonkers, you know. I’m in the schedule as good. So
many good things. And the more senior you get up in the organization,
the more I see it in organizations. And I look at that, and I think those are the people you don’t want
00:38:39,660 in back-to-back meetings. What I want them is I don’t care whether
they’re sitting in a yoga position or they’re sat in a meeting room with a
whiteboard, strategizing and thinking about ten years’ hence for your organization. And being- Right. That being blue screen, that’s
00:38:57,100 where they should- How do we leverage this organization that far
ahead? Not that tactical stuff of dealing with what’s going on today. And
to that point, the people that we go to, I work for a Chief Technology Officer, I’m
00:39:11,260 for about a year and a half, and you better have a good story when
you’re in his office. I remember two things. Here’s- I worked for Lotus Development once. There was a good place to work many years ago. And I had a boss there who was a senior manager, and he was my boss’s
00:39:28,340 boss. My boss said, “I went to him and I knocked on his door.” He said,
“This better be good.” I remember what the topic was, and he said, “I
told him whatever it was, we resolved it later.” Maybe in the same year, I went to- To my family to Disney in Orlando, Florida.
00:39:45,840 And I ran into him at the airport. Bar, hey Jim, how’s it going? He was a completely different fellow, of course. He was completely different
fellow, but he was being in the business most. We realized that when we go to these people, like you said, to go back what you said, you
00:40:02,960 want people to have tried something, I want to make sure that I have
the best use of the time. If I scheduled a half hour meeting with this
Chief Technology Officer, if I can get a done 10 minutes, he would be very happy. 20 minutes back in his schedule, or he would
00:40:19,240 cut it short or do whatever he could to do that. So I think it’s important
to your point about those people thinking. I talked about Zoom fatigue, and we talked about people’s ability to move around. Steve Jobs was famous for taking long walks. If you ever see that
00:40:35,160 read these Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson about Steve Jobs, he’s
recently written a book about a mask which I’m not going to read, but I read these Steve Jobs one. And Jobs would take, come take a walk
with me. And they would take a long walk, he was strategized. And you
00:40:49,240 know, wherever you want to say about jobs, how many industries was
he significant in five, six, seven? So, you know, taking those walks, moving around, how many times do we have the aha moment in the shower or whatever? I take walks. Unfortunately, I don’t have the
00:41:04,360 inspirational things, but I get out of my own head for a while and do
that. Get out, get some fresh airs. So I think it’s important for people to
decompress a little bit. And I think they don’t do that. So there’s so many things are psychological as I think about
00:41:18,400 it as you and I talk about it around running the meeting that have less to
do with the grunt work of the meeting and more to do with attitude and
like I said, emotional intelligence we can talk for an hour about that. You’re reading the room when I became an Azure coach,
00:41:33,440 we would say you should know what happened in the room before you enter the room. You know, were the dynamics going on there? That’s
true of any kind of a meeting I think whether it’s teaching or anything
else, there’s so much to it. I think we are losing the numbers aren’t
00:41:50,360 as good on the success of projects they should be. Remember when
Azure came along and the Agilistry, like it was the panacea. And now I
found them arguing about things all the time as it was. I guess it wasn’t. But I know this. I know this. Agil has a lot of meetings and
00:42:06,920 I know now that the being run by people who may or may not know how
to run meetings. So I think it’s important on either side of the equation
to do that. But I would I would tell your listeners and viewers any kind of a retrospective is good looking back and saying, what did we
00:42:22,520 do? Well, what did we not do? So well, what’s the one thing we can
improve in our next sprint? Or again, if you’re running meetings and something happened in the meeting, you go back and say, what’s the one thing I could improve on that meeting? What could I, did
00:42:36,920 I have an agenda that I have the right people there that I control the
meeting? Let me improve that one thing. And then people will not get a
clamor to come to your meeting and carry you out in their shoulders, but they’ll, they’ll not dread the thought of you meeting.
00:42:52,360 Yeah, that worked with a pretty well run. Yeah. Well, I’m just, I’m just spotted that coming up on an hour and a quarter, we’ve been talking
about this and it’s a fascinating subject. This probably another two or three hours we could carry on talking about it. I’m
00:43:07,040 sure. People, I’m sure people want to find out more of this. I know this
loads of, you’ve got loads of content for yourself. There’s the book itself,
remind us of what it’s called again. It is. I’m trying to find it. I can’t remember that. Where’s the, the, the, the
00:43:26,640 contest title? Great. Mill Great meetings, Bill great teams and it’s a guy’s for project leaders and adulous Amazon, the usual places. There’s a Kindle version. There is a print version. Rich and I have
talked about an audio version, but that’s another project. Only not that
00:43:44,240 people have requested it, but it’s very much of a, not some bolts. How
do I want to meet it is not lofty. It is not academic. I have to pull rich
away from the academic because it isn’t academic. So we try to make a brief handbook, a couple hundred pages on how to
00:43:58,520 run a meeting. If you adopt couple of techniques, you’re ahead of the
game, I think, something with the science of it and whatnot. So it’s good
stuff. Great. And if people would like to get in touch with you, what’s the best way? They can, I’ll give you my email address. They
00:44:15,160 can email me if they want. I don’t care. It’s Jay Stewart. So JSTW ART at JP Stewart Consulting JPSTEW ART Consulting.com. That’s been a
professional email. I’m fine. I’ll talk to people, email them, whatever. You
know, I, you, you and I talked about that. We mentor people. We talk to
00:44:38,280 people. People don’t time me down for months or time to ask a question
or two and they move on. So I can, if I can be of help, they’d be great.
Brilliant. Well, Jim, thank you so much for giving me so much time and such an interesting fascinating tool. There’s a few things in
00:44:53,600 there. I think, I think I need to apply some retrospective to some of my
meetings as well again and kind of start thinking about that attention
around all the people who are in that meeting as the meetings I’ve had today that I know that I’m going to rethink about how,
00:45:06,680 when we frame how I might have done them and maybe get some
advice on some others. I think it’s five things, six, five things. But if you
try to fix five things, you might say, I can’t fix them off. Fix none. If the worst thing that happened was it ran over or they
00:45:21,520 all ran over. Try to fix that. Yeah. That’s it. I deal. Brilliant. Well, have a
wonderful rest of your day and it’s good speech here. Thanks for your time. Take care. Thank you. Another great sponsor of the show. He comes in form of Air Manual. Air Manual is a, well,
00:45:47,240 it’s a tool for documenting process which, and best practices, it’s run
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00:46:08,440 something, a process that put it in a, a visual dome that gets loaded
onto a shelf outside or something similar. And then a bunch of products are then, once that diagram has been shared with senior management,
they’re happy they have a process of, but then the detailed procedures
00:46:22,240 underneath it might be with documents, just poorly kept and not linked
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00:46:41,520 flow and you build it down to its lower level of detail, eat it into the point
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00:46:58,800 the share point and then when you change to new share point services and well, that’s all there. So if you pop along to
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organization. So, let’s get to that. So this is my final wrap up every
week. You’re going to hear this, you’re going to get bored of it, but you can always click next podcast if so. If you have enjoyed
00:47:53,240 it, if you’ve listened to this podcast at the end of this show and you think
that was great, I’d love to be able to help Nigel out, there are loads of
ways you can do it. The first and obvious way is to share the podcast, send it out to people. If you know colleagues,
00:48:13,160 or friends who’ve benefit from it, think they’d enjoy it, just send them the link, grab one of the links, send it, or send them to www.NigelCriser.com/podcasts. That’s www.NigelCriser.com/podcasts.
And that’ll push them over to a link tree link and it’s got all of the different ways they
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they’re available in all the usual places and print and digital. Again, jump on the website www.NigelCriser.com/shop and that will give you
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get a little bit of a kickback from them. If you are of a sporting mind, I have a number through doing some of my judo
00:49:19,080 and running antics. I’ve managed to secure a few affiliate links and
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there’s links to those as well. So clicking on to those and grabbing your, if you’re with it, if you’re looking to get super
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00:50:00,000 again because the more of you that come back, the more visibility I get because there’s more times that you’re downloading and all the SEO
works and things like that. So yeah, that’s it. So if you can help me out, I would be much appreciated. If you can, don’t worry
00:50:18,720 about it. Thank you very much, Chizna. Bye. My latest, the latest
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they also do is they do a, this streamer, a lower quality version of it up onto as you’re doing the interview. So you’re not burning bandwidth while you’re doing the interview and potentially impacting
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00:52:13,760 [Music] Well it’s goodbye from me, Nigel Creaser, and it’s goodbye from him, the Sunday lunch PM. Goodbye.